(1961) The Prize Read online

  Although Claude had possessed her half a dozen times in the two weeks, the anticipation of it—the transformation—again aroused him more keenly than ever, and he longed for her to return and be off with him. As he called to the waiter for the check, his mind was still on the miracle of their union. He had a certain pride in the affair. It was not only her evident desirability and beauty, which, after all, he could not show the world, but the fact that she enjoyed him.

  He was forty-six, and she twenty-seven, and he had been an intellectual and a man of science since his youth. He had been too long devoted to tubes and bottles and counters that smelled of acid, and too devoted to introspections, to regard himself as débonair or attractive, although now, in these last weeks, he had felt attractive. His hair was bushy and greying, his broad face not yet fleshy but regular except for the narrow eyes and beaked French nose, his body inclined to weight and called by one newspaper ‘heavy-set’, but still strong and firm, so that he continued to play tennis once a week and play boule in the Bois twice a week. She could have younger men, gayer men, richer men, and certainly unmarried men. Yet she had him and wanted no more. Here was another mystery of chemistry that he and Denise must investigate. He realized, immediately, that he had subconsciously thought of the name of his wife. That was improper, and he erased her name. He would not think of her on this night. He was in no mood for brooding over his culpability.

  Again, attempting to see himself through Gisèle’s eyes, he tried to weigh his value. Assets: intelligence, sensibility, modest fame. Liabilities: age, a certain stodginess, married.

  About to continue his reverie, he saw Gisèle approaching, the bouffant impeccable, the bowed lips wine, the long legs crossing in lazy strides against her tight purple skirt. He tried to rise as youthfully as possible, opening his wallet and counting out the necessary francs and despite service compris a generous tip to the serving people who would understand the bribe.

  He took up her full-length natural brown mink coat, held it as gallantly as a cloak, and she spun gracefully into it, coolly enwrapped and beauty enhanced.

  Outside, in the balmy Parisian night, they stood in the dark, narrow street, her hand in his, gazing at the great fenced Halle aux Vins.

  ‘I should like to go in there some night and sample everything,’ he said.

  ‘We do not need that,’ she said, squeezing his hand.

  ‘Still want to walk a little?’

  ‘Oh, yes. The Seine.’

  There were small dangers in this, he knew, but here was a night in November such as the one during which they had met, really met, in September. So he agreed.

  She linked her arm in his, and they strolled leisurely across the rue des Chantiers to the Boulevard St.-Germain, glanced into the corner café to see if there were anyone they might recognize, then crossed and walked to the Quai de la Tournelle. They crossed again to the low stone wall above the Seine, passed several closed wooden bookstalls, and halted to survey the placid river. On the river, like a floating chandelier, one of the bateaux-mouches, its curious glass dome shining in the half-moon, approached. Beyond it, the lights of the city were spectacular, and to the left, they could see the towering bright mass of Notre-Dame.

  He nodded at the sight-seeing boat. ‘I have never been on a bateau-mouche. Have you?’

  ‘Several times. It is wonderful fun.’

  ‘I had always supposed it was for tourists—’

  ‘It is for us first, the way the Seine is.’

  ‘Yes. Some night, let us do it. I almost feel like a tourist anyway—everything new—’

  They observed the boat again, and then, automatically, without the exchange of a word or pressure of their hands, they resumed walking toward Notre-Dame. The air seemed cooler now, and for Claude, this was evocative, conjuring up the first night that he had met Gisèle. Actually, he had seen her before he had met her. He had seen her in the late summer.

  It was a time when his life had become directionless and monotonous, and he had been possessed of a nervous restlessness. The preceding six years had been different, for there had been a luminous goal, and a total dedication to its achievement. Going back the six years, he remembered that the goal had been established by a chance remark Denise had happened to make one noon.

  He and Denise had become interested—possibly an unconscious reaction to their own personal inability to conceive offspring—in genetics, in the biological processes of perpetuating the race, and specifically in the effect of chemicals on chromosomes and genes. They had, as so many scientists before them, experimented with the Drosophila fly. They had attempted to induce artificially changes of the genes, as a means of predetermining or controlling the future sex of offspring. This work in mutations had not gone far, and had not been original, and Claude and Denise were discouraged on that fateful day when they joined several fellow workers lunching in the office next to the laboratory. During the repast, someone had mentioned a Russian paper devoted to advances made in transplanting a female ovum, and this had stimulated a heated discussion on heredity and sperms and fertilized eggs. Denise, in one of her infrequent fanciful moods (occurring whenever she was quietly desperate), had remarked playfully, ‘Suppose it were possible to preserve the living spermatozoon of a Charlemagne or an Erasmus, or the unfertilized egg of a Cleopatra, and implant them today, by modern means, centuries after their donors were dead?’ The fancy had been electric. Claude and Denise had continued to speculate upon it first, romantically, and, at last, scientifically.

  The first years had been drudge years of collecting facts. From this handful of facts had grown a tentative hypothesis, and then had followed crude experiments with lower animals. During these experiments, they had made a startling discovery, whose validity was soon verified by the statistics from mass experiments. After their joint paper had been read and published, and widely hailed, and popularized in the press, and Claude and Denise had been exposed to a brief burst of publicity, they had suddenly found themselves at a curious dead end of existence.

  The six years of absolute concentration on one subject, without any life or social intercourse beyond that of the laboratory and each other and the spermatozoa, had left them mentally and physically debilitated, drained to the marrow, and without resources to interest themselves afresh in anything else. Weary of their work after victory, they had left its routine development to other eager minds around the world. For themselves, they had been brought to rest in a vacuum of accomplishment. After discussing, and quickly discarding, several new projects, they had by mutual consent agreed to relax, fulfil workaday demands in connection with their discovery, and wait mystically for another inspiration. For the first time in years, Denise had busied herself about the old apartment, sorting, repairing, replacing, and had caught up on correspondence and relatives and the few friends left. Claude found his own vacuum more difficult to fill: tennis and boule, of course, and lunches on the Right Bank, some speeches, investigation of investments, an effort to catch up on reading long neglected. But it was dull and not man’s occupation.

  It was at this time, by chance, that several English colleagues had come from Oxford, and since it was late July, and the fifty Paris fashion houses were busy showing their new collections, the English wife of one colleague announced her desire to see such an event. With his recent position of eminence, Claude Marceau had no trouble obtaining the necessary invitations. The invitations were for a Balenciaga collection, to be displayed in the great couturier’s rose stone building off the Champs-Élysées, and because he had nothing better to do, Claude had reluctantly accompanied Denise (who had never been to such an affair either) and the English couples to the showing.

  Claude had released his invitations to the head vendeuse on the third floor, and then had passed, with his wife and guests, into the main salon. Two rows of gold painted wooden chairs were distributed around the showroom. Claude and his party took their places before the large mirror at the far end. The sudden barrage from the over bright co
rner ceiling lights and the dozen lights in the recessed centre of the ceiling had been the signal for customers to remove their coats, and Claude had gratefully imitated the others.

  At once, the showing had begun. Claude had watched with mild interest as the animated mannequins, ten working in unceasing tandem, emerged from behind a curtain opposite, paraded across the floor towards him in their outlandish coats and jackets and dresses, carrying in their right hands cards with their costume numbers, spun before him, returned past the three windows towards their entry, and exited by a side opening.

  For Claude, at first, it had been restless and tedious nonsense, and then, without being aware of it, he was erect on the edge of his gold chair. Suddenly, all of his senses were engaged. He found himself staring at a mannequin whose breathtaking beauty, chic, haughty manner dominated the functional modern room. This, he would later learn, was Gisèle Jordan.

  She appeared and reappeared, with the nine others, and Claude was mesmerized. Once, perhaps on her twelfth presentation, striding disdainfully before his party, pirouetting before the women, sweeping her furs off her daring cocktail gown, her blue eyes had held on his. They offered no message, only a challenge. Or so he thought. Afterwards, riding home, he had dwelt on the moment, cherished it, and let it play out, but then his factual scientific sensibility had taken over. The moment had been illusion, invented by his need, and he decided with finality that he had been mistaken and foolish.

  But two months later, still in the doldrums and taking the crisp air on the Champs-Élysées at dusk, he learned that he had not been foolish. Passing Fouquet’s, he had casually glanced at the faces behind the tables, and one of them he recognized at once. What had emboldened him to confront her he would never know. But he had, indeed, halted, made his way to her table, and introduced himself. Her face had reflected immediate recognition—yes, she remembered him from that showing several months ago, and she knew his name through his reputation. She invited him to sit with her, and he did, and she spoke easily. He realized that Balenciaga was nearby, in the Avenue George-V, and that she often came to Fouquet’s for a glass of champagne after work and before dinner. Most frequently she came alone, but sometimes she met her agent for fashion magazines, M. Favre, a slight and dandified latent homosexual who loved her possessively and was important to the advancement of her career.

  They had talked and talked, and two hours later had dined at Le Taillevent in the rue Lamennais, off the Champs-Élysées, and later walked, starting and stopping often, the length of the Faubourg-St.-Honoré to the Madeleine. It was nearly midnight when he had put her in a taxi. After that, he had walked the entire distance back to the apartment, his mind boyish and alive and in a turmoil. Denise was listening to the wireless, not at all alarmed by his late return, and he made an unrehearsed excuse quickly and deftly, and was gay and joking with his wife, and for the first time in a year, he had felt no tiredness or depression at all.

  In the weeks following, first once a week, then twice, they had met discreetly, with the spontaneity of an accidental encounter, each unsure of the other, and each aware of Denise and M. Favre. But after six weeks, they knew simultaneously, instinctively, that the intimate conversation, the self-revelations, the hand holding, the kissing were not enough. And so she had, at last, given in to the inevitable climax without his urging, and had invited him to her small two-room apartment, exquisitely furnished (the living room pieces were from the best antique shops in the Flea Market), in the rue du Bac, not far from the Boulevard St.-Germain. And there, with little preliminary, she had revealed herself to him, all molten beneath the glacial surface, and that night, he had been stimulated, virile, and attractive again. That night, for the first time in six years, he had not once given a thought to spermatozoa, at least not clinically—or to Denise, his collaborator.

  Reliving all of this now, as he strolled along the Seine, had briefly removed him from the present reality. Gisèle’s voice, intruding upon him, was a surprise. ‘Claude,’ she was saying, ‘whatever are you brooding about?’

  ‘Brooding? Heavens, no. I was thinking back—how we first met.’

  She gripped his arm more possessively. ‘I never think of that. Only of now.’

  He nodded. ‘It is best.’

  Ahead, he could see a taxi disgorging well-dressed men and women into the world of pressed ducks—Tour d’Argent—and he knew that there was the populous danger zone, and that he could continue no farther without risk.

  He stopped in his tracks. ‘Let us go, Gisèle. I want you.’

  She caught her breath. ‘Right now?’

  ‘As soon as possible.’

  ‘Yes. I would like that.’

  They waited patiently at the kerb, and he signalled the next free taxi leaving the Tour d’Argent, and once inside, they headed for the rue du Bac. She sat apart from him, in her genteel public way, and they held hands on the seat between them.

  He stared absently out of the car’s window, as the old narrow streets of the Left Bank blurred past, and he wondered what would finally happen to them. It was impossible to imagine a life without her, yet it was equally impossible to imagine divorcing Denise after twelve years. Yet, he asked himself, why not? Denise and he were childless, so that would pose no problem. There was adequate money since the discovery, so that was no problem, either. Denise was self-sufficient, too much so, he often thought. She had the capability to survive and adjust. She was not dangerously female—which he interpreted to mean that she was not an emotional hysteric, a leaner, an obsessive neurotic.

  Still, why was he so fearful that she might learn of his affair? He examined the question. Was it that he was too sensitive to hurt an old companion? Or—was it because she was more than mere companion and wife? Was it because she was a partner in his work, and thus essential to him? Could Beaumont have been Beaumont without Fletcher? Or Gilbert have been Gilbert without Sullivan? Or Chang survived without Eng? Perhaps, in a dozen years, they had become the Siamese Twins, and to cut one off might mean death to both.

  Possibly, divorce was wrong. Why not continue the status quo? Possibly, like Victor Hugo, he could spend his lifetime exactly like this, with a wife in one place and a Juliette Drouet somewhere else. How many years had Hugo openly managed his double life? Claude calculated: Hugo, at thirty-one, had met Juliette in 1833 when she was twenty-seven (Gisèle’s very age!), and kept her for mistress all the rest of her life, which was long, for she did not die until 1883. He had kept his mistress for fifty years, and when she had died, he had remarked, ‘The dead are not absent, but invisible’. But was Gisèle a Juliette Drouet? And was Denise a Madame Adèle Hugo? Or would it finally have to be a divorce, a scandal? Did the Curies ever think of divorce? Questions, questions. The devil with them. There was tonight, and Gisèle beside him, and tonight was all and the only reality. He focused his attention through the taxi window. They had turned into the rue du Bac. . . .

  The moment they were inside Gisèle’s living-room, Claude took her in his arms, holding her close and kissing her neck, and ear, and hair, and forehead, and lips. Shivering, feeling his imperative desire and her own, she pushed him off and, without a word, hurried into the bedroom.

  Claude secured the door, then moved to the cognac decanter on the marble top of the aged wooden commode. He poured a drink, held the glass between his fingers, rolling it gently, warming the amber fluid with his warm palm. Leisurely, then, he sipped the cognac. Doing so, he surveyed the room. It possessed an air of casual elegance. Gisèle’s good taste was evident in the antique sycamore writing table inlaid with porcelain plaques, in the Louis XV period lamp bases and ashtrays found in the Flea Market, in the matted illuminated manuscript pages framed on the walls.

  He could not help but contrast the charm of this with his own tasteless living-room, large, indefinite, disorderly, velvet sofas and chairs clashing with the wallpaper in imitation of the Directoire design, which Denise had furnished. In all fairness, Denise had possessed no more time than he had
to devote to furnishings. Like him, she was a full-time scientist. Yet her poor taste extended to the matter of dress. He considered Gisèle’s flawless suits and dresses, and could only remember Denise wearing a spotty linen chemist’s smock, or at her best, ordinary blouses and loose skirts and flatheeled shoes that were usually scuffed. Thinking of his wife’s attire, he was reminded of Jonathan Swift’s description of the woman who wore her clothes as if they had been thrown on her with a pitchfork.

  The cognac inspired him to further comparison, odious as this was, and he judged his two women, mistress and wife, side by side in nudity. He tried to be fair. Technically, divested of all clothing, Gisèle was less than perfection. When she was unclad, her lines were too spare, bony, almost skeletal. It was the body required of all mannequins who earned 20,000 francs a week, he knew, for its dimensions were made to display the drape of garments. In full attire, Gisèle was incomparable; in nudity, there was something missing. What made up for her physical deficiencies when disrobed was Gisèle’s impatient fever for love, and this Claude understood and appreciated. By comparison, Denise was shorter, fuller, rounder. Her shortcomings were her hair, shingled in a masculine bob, a nose too pugged, hips too wide, thighs too thick. In full dress, she was not soignée, and bulged and protruded too much to possess the mannequin chic. Stark naked, she was twice as attractive. And in all fairness, and this Claude admitted to himself even now, there was the advantage of her bosom. Denise had enormous pear-shaped breasts, and to this day, in her forty-second year, they hardly sagged at all. Still, he told himself, he had to admit a preference for Gisèle’s flatter breasts, as well as her flat hips and buttocks. They were unpretentious, but more inciting, because Gisèle was more inciting.

  Was it caddish to project the comparison into bed? He sipped the cognac. It was wrong, but his mind unreeled the pictures. Sleeping with Denise, so fleshy, so tired, so inert, was like crawling into the womb. It was safe, easy, secure, never unexpected. It was nicely pleasurable. But Gisèle, taut, vibrating, aggressive, her magnificent flesh a wild and memorable offering, was—he considered a conservative description befitting a scientist—surfeiting? No. Enthralling? No. Captivating, yes, more, much more—captivating, satiating, and an indescribable ecstasy.